By the time we receive a drive it generally contains those items that someone would least want read by any stranger. What follows is how in practice we handle these types of drives as opposed to stating our intentions: ICO registration, one named engineer per job, no subcontracting and nothing crossing a border at any stage.
ICO registered and GDPR compliant. One named engineer for each job, with confidentiality assumed rather than negotiated and working copies destroyed on your schedule rather than ours.
A great deal of data recovery in the UK is sent forward to a third party, which means more hands involved, more transit and more people with access. This does not happen with us.
At no point will data leave the country, which matters when doing regulated work or if you are under contractual restrictions on where your information may be located.
We use the same person throughout on business and institutional work, so the number of people who have access to your data is as small as possible and is recorded.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office and document the chain of custody as normal on all regulated work, even if you don't specifically request it.
We do not browse your files. Recovery verifies that files open and are structurally intact. Recovery doesn't need to read files; recovery also won't unlock encrypted items like a cryptocurrency wallet, so recovery returns the file (encrypted) without ever unlocking it.
We do not keep copies. All working images are deleted after delivery. Any original media is kept for 14 days in case some item was missed, then securely erased unless you've instructed otherwise.
We do not ask for your keys. Passphrases, seed phrases and private keys are never required to deliver an encrypted file back to you. If someone asks for them, they are attempting to perform something other than recovery.
We do not bypass encryption on media you do not own. If the person requesting recovery is not the owner, we refuse service. This has cost us business and continues to be the right response.
NDAs, data processing agreements, and information governance terms can all be executed prior to sending anything versus being added after the fact. Tell us the framework applicable to your matter at our diagnostic stage and it will be established for you in advance.
We document receipt, acquisition and every transfer of clinical, legal and financial material as standard. Where a matter may ultimately end up in proceedings, this documentation will be the difference between findings that survive challenge and those that do not, and it can only be applied prospectively (not retrospectively).
We also provide an option for secure destruction of equipment, with certified documentation including the serial numbers of devices being destroyed (for equipment which will never again come back into service).
The engineer doing the work sees it, and on business work we always have just one named individual throughout. There is no subcontracting of any type and at no time is your data ever transferred outside of the UK.
After your data has been delivered to you, the working images are deleted. The original media remains in our possession for 14 days prior to secure erasure in case anything was overlooked, but if you wish us to do otherwise, please let us know.
Yes. And before the kit arrives. We would rather work to your terms than vice versa.
No. All of our engineering work is done in-house and at no time during this process does your data ever leave the United Kingdom.
Yes, however only with authorisation from the owner. We refuse requests to bypass encryption on media and/or to allow access to media where the person requesting it is not the owner, and we will not make any exceptions based upon someone providing a reasonable explanation.
It is available, and a certificate accompanies it, listing each device by serial number along with the method used. The method performed depends on the type of media: erasing data from disks using overwrite methods, performing a cryptographic erase on solid state drives, and physically destroying flash memory and dead drives.